John Glenn, who made history twice as the first American to orbit the Earth and the first senior citizen to venture into space, has been hospitalized, a spokesman at the Ohio State University college bearing his name said ...

Along with the visible light and warmth constantly emitted by our sun comes a whole spectrum of X-ray and ultraviolet radiation that streams toward Earth. A new CubeSat – a miniature satellite that provides a low-cost platform ...

The High Precision Telescope (HPT) installed in the Philippine's DIWATA-1 microsatellite jointly developed by Hokkaido University and other institutions has successfully captured images with a ground resolution of about 3 ...

Since ancient times, human beings have been staring at the night sky and been amazed by the celestial objects looking back at them. Whereas these objects were once thought to be divine in nature, and later mistaken for comets ...

(Phys.org)—The spiral galaxy NGC 5523 is believed to be an example of an isolated galaxy whose evolution was not influenced by other objects. However, a new study conducted by U.S. astronomers shows that the isolation of ...

We know that there is sound on planets and moons in the solar system – places where there's a medium through which sound waves can be transmitted, such as an atmosphere or an ocean. But what about empty space? You may have ...

NASA's New Horizons mission reached a major milestone this week when the last bits of science data from the Pluto flyby – stored on the spacecraft's digital recorders since July 2015 – arrived safely on Earth.

As technology becomes increasingly vital in our day-to-day lives, we are more susceptible to "space weather". What begins with dark spots on the Sun's surface, and magnetic field disruptions in the Sun's atmosphere, can result ...

When the Rosetta spacecraft successfully touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Sept. 30, the news was shared globally via Twitter in dozens of languages. Citizens the world over were engaged by the astronomical ...

Space

Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of the boundless four-dimensional continuum known as spacetime. In mathematics spaces with different numbers of dimensions and with different underlying structures can be examined. The concept of space is considered to be of fundamental importance to an understanding of the universe although disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework.

Many of the philosophical questions arose in the 17th century, during the early development of classical mechanics. In Isaac Newton's view, space was absolute - in the sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there were any matter in the space. Other natural philosophers, notably Gottfried Leibniz, thought instead that space was a collection of relations between objects, given by their distance and direction from one another. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant described space and time as elements of a systematic framework which humans use to structure their experience.

In the 19th and 20th centuries mathematicians began to examine non-Euclidean geometries, in which space can be said to be curved, rather than flat. According to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, space around gravitational fields deviates from Euclidean space. Experimental tests of general relativity have confirmed that non-Euclidean space provides a better model for explaining the existing laws of mechanics and optics.